Due to rapid increasing demands of wireless multimedia applications, plenty of videos are transmitted through wireless channels. However, error-prone and band-limited nature of wireless communication usually lead to high packet loss/error rate, delay or jitter, which influence the quality of experiences at the user ends.
Accordingly, a scalable video coding technique takes emphasis in recent years. The scalable video coding encodes video into multiple layers in accordance with spatial, temporal and quality scalabilities. The feature of the scalable video coding is that parts of the stream can be removed in a way that the resulting sub-stream forms another valid bit stream for some target decoder. Besides, the scalability nature of the scalable video coding provides hierarchical decoding qualities based on user demands, hardware specifications and network qualities. When the scalable coding is applied to MIMO (multi-input multi-output) system, through selection of channels and power allocation, the decoding quality of transmitted video can be effectively increased. In power allocation, equal power allocation and water-filling algorithm are common algorithms. However, equal power is not able to raise the decoding quality of transmitted video effectively. Water-filling algorithm is optimal in terms of system capacity but not user experience when video transmissions are considered.